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- Convenors:
-
Lesley Branagan
(Hamburg University)
Anna Dowrick (University of Oxford)
Rebecca Cassidy (University of Kent)
Simon Bailey (University of Kent)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Covid’s threat to modern reasoning and subsequent divisions are located in policies, discourses and experiences of vaccines, polarised into ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ sentiment. We consider the interplay between the promises of vaccines, unexpected vaccine experiences, and Covid’s threat to rational order.
Long Abstract:
The Covid pandemic brought significant transformations in the technologies, roles, governance, discourses and meanings of vaccines.
The technological and political promise of Covid vaccines has left limited space for exploration of their unintended consequences. Dramatic polarisations of ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ sentiments result in disbelief, silencing, and exploitation of unexpected experiences connected to vaccination, particularly in the context of vaccine injury. Similarly, desire to re-purpose vaccines for other uses, such as treatments for Long Covid, has met resistance.
In these responses we find a paradoxical refusal to consider the spaces and ‘residual categories’ (Bowker & Star, 2000) between pro- and anti-vaccination, and limited engagement in the multiplicity of what vaccines ‘do’. However, histories of changing uses of vaccines as technologies, vaccine injuries and medical-legal reform also show that there are potential sites for contesting these polarised categories (Kirkland, 2016).
We encourage explorations of the broader relations between the threat of Covid and the subsequent failures of reflexivity related to ‘unexpected reactions’ to, with, and about vaccines.
Paper proposals could consider:
The effects of complexity and uncertainty upon polarisation, and the paradoxical ‘hardening’ of both lay and professional perspectives on unexpected vaccine reactions;
The temporalities and futurism at play in promises concerning the unknowable (Beckert, 2016), and the consequent misdirection of vaccine expectations and resources;
The interplay of polarising categories of risk and threat, trust and mis-trust, and the possibilities for nuanced understandings of agency and vaccine hesitancy;
The ‘distribution of belief and unbelief’ (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982) represented by polarised vaccine discourses, and the positioning of different interests (scientific, professional, governmental);
Contestations of categorisations, through advocacy, or ‘citizenship work’ (Petryna, 2004) and the role of narrative in mediating between the ‘counter-factual and factual’ (Maier, 2004) in the context of unexpected events.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Shiwei Chen (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Short abstract:
In this study, I set out to retrace the unfolding of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Singapore through a twenty-one month ethnographic study about vaccine hesitancy. The larger issue I investigate the making of mistrust in health authorities, that I have come to see as a process of alienation.
Long abstract:
This article showcases how alienation can serve as a diagnostic tool to better understand public health governance crises. I revisit the conflicts surrounding the state-distributed COVID-19 vaccines in Singapore, a country that has achieved one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. Between 2021 and 2022, the country gradually deployed a host of “Vaccination Differentiated Safe Management Measures” to encourage/coerce the population to get vaccinated. This ethnographic study provides insight into the everyday life experiences of this population, unfolds how ever-tightening movement restrictions shaped the relationship of the jabbed, the unjabbed, and public health governance. I argue that experiences of alienation lead people to undergo a ‘loss of presence’ in the sense that they question their relationship with the government, health authorities and the people around them. Alienation helps to see this conflict in a new light. Instead of framing this conflict as one of misinformation, public misunderstanding of science, or continuing to ridicule people with the antivaxxer label, we need to take people’s everyday health practices and decision seriously. I show the practices of medical authoritarianism in public health governance can lead to undesired outcomes and how alienation helps us to unveil the problematic relationships.
Ben Kasstan (London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine)
Short abstract:
While polio vaccination campaigns in London and New York drew on the historical past to sway parents to accept vaccinations, parents and communities were instead concerned by the more recent legacy of Covid-19. This paper explores the entanglement of confidence, vaccines and temporality.
Long abstract:
Recent outbreaks in the global north offer an opportunity to conceive how epidemiological pasts are revived as part of contemporary disease events. In 2022, the United Kingdom Health Security Agency declared a national poliovirus incident and mobilized to vaccinate one million children across London. The spread of polio in London was linked to outbreaks in New and Jerusalem, where Charedi Jewish infants were particularly vulnerable to paralysis due to lower-level vaccination coverage.
Drawing on long term ethnographic research conducted in the UK, this paper explores how the spread of polio was encountered by parents and health professionals in London. The epidemiological past of twentieth-century epidemics was revived in public (health) responses to the spread of poliovirus in London and New York, often through references to sugar cubes, iron lungs, and timelines that narrate the impact of routine childhood immunisations. While memories of polio were widely deployed to provoke an urgency to vaccinate, vulnerable publics instead considered the more recent legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic when deciding whether to trust recommendations and responses.
Critical attention to memory places analysis on the divergences between institutional (public health agencies) and peopled (publics) responses to disease events. The framing of public health memory contributes to anthropological engagement with the temporality of disease outbreaks, particularly when historical and epidemiological pasts are evoked in ways that contrast with the contemporary dilemmas of people and parents.
Vincen Gregory Yu (University of Sydney)
Short abstract:
This presentation describes the 'vaccine authoritarianism' and necropolitical style of governance that defined the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the Philippines.
Long abstract:
My presentation uses the case of the Philippines to show how hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccines was reinforced by modern-day imaginaries of public health authoritarianism. Drawing from in-depth interviews conducted from August to November 2023 with individuals who identified as vaccine-hesitant, I describe the 'vaccine authoritarianism' that shaped people’s lived experiences in the country during the COVID-19 pandemic. I contend that such authoritarianism was a form of necropolitics, using two analytical foci to illustrate my point. First, I interrogate the widespread use of vaccination cards or passports, which, while never mandated by law, ended up dictating the (im)possibilities of mobility, sociality, employment, and economic survival. Second, I examine the implementation of the immunization campaign itself in socioeconomically marginalized communities, situating the campaign's draconian and discriminatory practices within the government's legacy of punitive policies. Taken together, these 'cartographies of blame' demonstrate the scapegoating of the unvaccinated as recalcitrant obstacles to society's supposed way out of the pandemic, in effect diverting attention from larger, structural issues that have remained unaddressed. I conclude by reflecting on the ways vaccination campaigns—and similar, large-scale health interventions—have been, and could be better communicated and delivered, as filtered through my interlocutors’ experiences.
Florian Helfer (Universität Hamburg)
Short abstract:
My Paper Examines the public discourse on COVID-19 vaccinations in Germany. Through the lens of moral anthropology, it looks at the discursive structure and asks about the implementation of ethical regimes in public health policy
Long abstract:
The discourse surrounding COVID-19 vaccination in Germany is characterized by a profound dichotomy. It oscillates between viewing vaccinations as the societal savior from a threatening disease to perceiving them as a technology entangled in government conspiracies, potentially harming the individual's freedom. This complex narrative is deeply embedded in the biopolitics of the state and the bio-governmentality of the people during times of crisis.
My research delves into the concept of "regimes of living," exploring the heterogeneous and unstable configuration of norms employed in public health communication. Drawing inspiration from Lakoff and Collier, I aim to unravel how ethical regimes and answers to the question of how one should live are interwoven with the discourse on vaccinations.
Leveraging a comprehensive dataset comprising over a hundred newspaper articles, talk show transcripts, and media posts, my discourse analysis identifies moral categories associated with vaccination. The findings illuminate the terms used to discuss vaccinations and reveal the diverse voices shaping conversations about vaccination security or side effects.
Taking a moral anthropology approach (Laidlaw), I extend my investigation beyond polarized discussions by incorporating ethnographic data from medical practitioners and post-vaccination patients. This research not only highlights existing moral categories and communities surrounding vaccinations but also aims to contribute to a more engaged anthropology, exploring how we can shape future discourses on vaccination.
Maria Conceição da Costa (State University of Campinas - UNICAMP) Jonatan Sacramento (University of Campinas)
Short abstract:
This paper aims to discuss three different experiences of vaccine hesitancy in two different contexts. Mobilizing the experience of smallpox (1904 and 1966-72) and the Zika epidemic in Brazil, and the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil and France.
Long abstract:
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines vaccine hesitancy as the delay or refusal, despite availability, in administering recommended vaccines (WHO, 2014). Hesitation comprises a broad spectrum of attitudes, from fear to total refusal, with different degrees.
In these gradations of refusal, we can point out the fear regarding new medicines for religious, ideological, and scientific reasons. In the literature, we consider two pertinent aspects that interpose gender relations in research on these diseases and women as subjects who stand out in this refusal movement and the movement of actions in favor of mass vaccinations.
Our objective is to think about vaccination practices and discourses about belief, disbelief, biomedical citizenship, and individual autonomy in shaping vaccine acceptance speeches. Our analysis will be guided to understand such processes as gendered, marked by gender imaginaries that, when shaping male and female performances and, among these, those of motherhood, also shape discourses and practices of vaccine acceptance or denial. In addition to denialism, we hypothesize that the contextual idea of hesitation serves as a better analytical tool for understanding the processes of refusal or acceptance of vaccination practices in contexts of health emergencies. By comparing three distinct historical moments and two different social contexts, our objective is to analyze how social context, biomedical technologies, relationships, and health emergencies co-produce each other, leading to the need to understand vaccine hesitancy as a situated phenomenon, which depends on the national context, diversity of experiences and which points to different ways of experiencing health emergencies.
Dan Artus (UCL)
Short abstract:
This paper argues that the categorical divisions that underpin modernity are operationalised in difficult conversations about vaccines, often to deleterious effect. Through attending to vaccines explicitly as objects, I argue that these divisions can be re-thought and (hopefully) overcome.
Long abstract:
Whilst Kirkland asks what would happen if we consider vaccines 'political from the start' (2016, p.x), I am interested in interrogating the mechanisms by which their purported separation from politics is sustained. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dublin, Ireland from 2019-2022 (split in half by the COVID-19 pandemic), I examine the ways in which this division between vaccines and politics are operationalised in the everyday lives of my participants in public health and local communities and vaccine sceptics observed at rallies, public online spaces and wider secondary sources. The challenges of expressing doubt, anxiety or scepticism - which might be described as 'vaccine hesitancy' - draw out the depth of what Latour might describe the 'strength' or 'unassailability' of vaccines. I move that this strength can be conceptualised as resting on a series of a-priori categorical separations (politics / science, facts / values, nature / culture, technology / society), deeply rooted in modernist ontologies and mobilised at scale in the present, past and future of vaccines. This is particularly notable given the strength of condemnation expressed in labels used to describe seeming ‘anti-vaxxers’ -‘reality denial’, ‘science denier’ and even ‘child-murderers’. These moral, epistemological, political and even ontological divisions may seem insurmountable and deeply painful, causing distress to families who worry they’ve ‘lost’ loved ones over disputes about vaccination. STS and anthropological approaches propose to translate these at once real and conceptual distinctions into new ontological terrain which opens new possibilities for understanding emerging situations around vaccines.
Jan Hinrichsen (University Medical Centre Göttingen)
Short abstract:
The clinical trial of a COVID vaccine is imbued with the polarization of unknowing/uncertainty/skepticism and knowing/promise/hope. In the participants’ embodiment of biotechnology, they materialize this tension in their bodies while mRNA-biotechnology makes their immune systems “response-able”.
Long abstract:
Following the panel’s invitation to inquire into the “multiplicity of what vaccines ‘do’”, I inquire ‘how culture gets under the skin’ (Niewöhner et al). That is: framed in cultural anthropological STS and an ethnographic/praxiographic framework, I seek to understand how an mRNA-based vaccine constitutes bodies, subjects, and socialities in the face of pending pandemic threat. In a placebo-controlled clinical trial that tested the safety, reactogenicity, and immunogenicity of a first-in-human mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine, I have analyzed an emerging biotechnology, the efficacy and effects of which were, at the time, not known but furthermore a sociotechnical knowledge practice ‘in the making’. My inquiry unboxes the myriad practices that are employed to produce reliable data on the novel vaccine, engender and distribute immunities and ‘response-able’ bodies, and, eventually, aim to underscore the trustworthiness of mRNA vaccination against the background of high levels of uncertainty and skepticism (in regards the course of the pandemic and the efficacy of COVID vaccines) on the one hand, and of hope and promise (in regards the merits of mRNA technology from saving the world of raging pandemic to curing cancer) on the other. In this paper I argue that this polarization not only constitutes an active and relevant arena of (ethical) negotiation within the clinical practices and thus has significant influence on the trial, but is furthermore actively engaged in the participants’ embodiment of biotechnology as it materializes in their bodies, and in the ways mRNA-biotechnology makes their immune systems “response-able” (Haraway).
Nataliya Aluferova (University of Hamburg)
Short abstract:
The paper analyses the practices of vaccine skeptics among the Russian-speaking community in Germany and the meanings behind them (varying from political acts to health-related practices).
Long abstract:
The mandatory Covid-19 vaccination policy in Germany has sparked a debate about democracy and civil liberties. This decision has led to a discourse on the restriction of rights and individual freedoms, which has been popular not only among vaccine skeptics.
My research focuses on people from the Russian-speaking community who have a Soviet or post-Soviet background and currently live in Germany. The data I have collected shows that many of them have a low level of trust in the social system and the government. Distrust can be seen as a rational strategy for adapting to frequent crises and situations of uncertainty. This can lead to developing a habit of circumventing formal rules, known as «mestis» (Scott 1999), resulting also in vaccine hesitancy.
In the interviews, my research participants share their tactics (Certeau 1984) for circumventing vaccination regulations in Germany. These tactics varied from presenting counterfeit test results to utilising specialised compresses that, according to their belief, can neutralise the vaccine's impact if already administered. I argue that these practices cannot be reduced to -pro or -anti sentiments. Rather, they represent a complex and multifaceted set of beliefs and meanings that require careful consideration and analysis.
In my paper, I would like to discuss the changing practices of vaccine skeptics in response to the compulsory Covid vaccination policy implemented by the German government. Specifically, I seek to investigate the world of meanings behind them (varying from political acts to health-related practices).